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Friday 5 September 2008

1968 and all that

Allan Massie remembers 1968

So it’s a crime novel, a political novel, a novel of ideas, a social novel too (with one hilarious dinner party where the great and good, and also an intellectual guru of the young leftists, are assembled). There’s a breadth and depth of understanding: Michel himself, Max, and the playboy Gary are treated generously, with sympathy, even if we are shown their essential irresponsibility and intellectual frivolity. Cartry himself is more interesting: a poor boy who has become rich, self-confident, now tested as never before. The novel has an epigraph from Tolstoy’s Journal: ‘How good it would be to write a work of art which clearly expressed man’s fluidity, that fact that, while remaining himself, he is now a villain, now an angel, now a sage, now an idiot, now strong, now the weakest of beings.’ Cartry is all that; an extraordinarily convincing creation.

It’s now of course historical. Frenchmen of Cartry’s generation and the one immediately before him lived through experiences which made conspiracy and violence seem natural, even inescapable: the Occupation, Collaboration, Resistance, the Purge (épuration) of those who had been on the wrong side in the war. Then, whereas we relinquished our Empire almost as if it had never mattered, the French fought to keep theirs — in Indo-China and, still more bitterly and divisively, in Algeria. A generation of French public men — politicians, civil servants, even professors, as well as, obviously, army officers — lived in a world where acts of terrorism were common, often admired. (Read, for example, Patrick Marnham’s splendid essays Crime and the Académie Française.) That generation has passed away. Even the soixante-huitards are now approaching pensionable age. All the same one reflects that, aged 13, Nicholas Sarkozy was prevented by his mother from joining a Gaullist counter-demonstration in May ’68.

The novel was published in 1994, long enough after the events to allow Pauwels to get them in perspective. He describes with keen insight a society which has lost its children because it has lost its soul; relevant to us today? A reminder that though terrorism is wicked and foolish, it may also be the expression of a thwarted and twisted idealism. It’s a novel which makes you both think and feel at the same time, like those other evocations of the shadow-line between civility and crime, The Devils and The Secret Agent. Any novel which invites comparison with Dostoevsky and Conrad is quite something.

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